1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to a system and method for efficient communication between and among virtual machines, and more particularly to the use of virtual machine queues to communicate between and among virtual machines.
2. Related Art
In a computer environment, multiple virtual machines (VMs) can run on one platform at the same time. These virtual machines may contain standard operating systems, such as, e.g., Microsoft Windows® or Linux, or a much smaller operating system. When multiple VMs are running on a platform at a given time, the need may arise for the VMs to communicate with each other.
Inter-virtual machine (VM) communication currently consists of two different software-based techniques. First, communication via a network is the most common technique because most VMs have network adapters. Second, shared memory is used to map a block of memory into each of the VMs' address spaces that need to communicate. Access to this memory is then synchronized via a software-based semaphore bit or some other synchronization mechanism.
Each of the above-described techniques has limitations. The networking technique requires full networking stacks in each of the VMs, which creates large overhead. Additionally, both VMs must be running compatible network protocols and be able to discover each other to establish communication. Shared memory is limited by the size of the shared memory block. In other words, it does not work for communication that needs to move variable-sized blocks of data between VMs. Further, the synchronization model is also difficult because each VM needs to have software running to understand the synchronization model.